CloudBees Launches Hudson as a Service

In my 2009 year end blog I hinted at the new start-up being created by my friend Sacha Labourey, the former CTO of JBoss. I am happy to say the past 9 months have flown by and Sacha and the team have created something truly exciting.

The vision of CloudBees is to offer a Java Platform as a Service. This is cool, but the market will take time to evolve. The interesting twist that CloudBees has come up with is to offer real services to the Java community as a Cloud based service (kind of like how SalesForce is useful to sales teams, CloudBees will initially be very useful to development teams).

I call the core of the offering “Hudson as a Service” (HaaS). In case you do not know, Hudson is an open source Continuous Integration project. It allows development teams to set it up to watch for any code changes in places like svn and git, automagically do a build with things like Ant and Maven, do tests and then take actions like rolling back or rolling forward! It has reached similar reach as JIRA with well over 20,000 sites using Hudson – and it is growing fast.

Hudson is perfect as a Cloud Service. It is kind of hard to set up (the CloudBees HaaS makes it easy), it is bursty (so CloudBees charging by the minute makes a lot of economic sense), development and release teams never have enough machine resources for all the processes Hudson needs to spawn (no problem with a cloud of worker-bee Hudson Slaves dynamically scaling up and down to handle any load), and it works best when it delivers on the promise of CONTINUOUS Integration (CloudBees is ready when you are).

Some of the Alpha customers were already running Hudson on Amazon, and CloudBees will be able to significantly drop their costs since there is a low fixed fee for the Hudson Master and the slaves are dynamically provisioned and shut down as well as billed by the minute (with 0 system administrator overhead). Alpha customers who are running their own Hudson Master and slaves were able to get all the resources they needed during peaks and only paid for that.

I like being involved as an advisor to CloudBees. The company is using and creating cloud technology to solve real problems in the right way.

The public Beta is open. If you are a Java shop, or know of one – tell them about CloudBees. It is worth a look!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ringside Winding Down

A year ago, a group of us met in a pizza parlor to discuss how we could bring the social web to every website and business. In January, we launched Ringside Networks with seed funding from Matrix Partners, one of the best VC firms in the country. By the end of March we released into open source an initial beta of our Social Application Server – a very ambitious project. We got some very positive reviews on our approach, our implementation and the need in the marketplace for every website to become social. We were ready for our Series A round of funding, and in late May we received a number of term sheet offers from the very best VC firms. As we were about to finalize our funding, one of the biggest non-evil Internet companies asked if we would have interest in being acquired instead. After a lot of thought and debate, we decided that the larger company would enable us to get our technology to market sooner and with more impact. The story sounds almost too good to be true. And it w
Read more

Capitalism vs. the Three Legged Stool

Image
Wikipedia defines: " Capitalism  is an  economic system  in which trade, industry and the  means of production  are controlled by private owners with the goal of making  profits  in a  market economy ." This definition has always bothered me. I prefer a different model where there is equal recognition of the three primary drivers behind the success of a company: Owners Employees Customers I like to think of it as a three legged stool, where each leg is as important as the other.  One gets too large or small and the stool tips over. The free market is supposed to take care of Employees and Customers.  Employees because the Owners will create so many jobs that due to supply and demand, employees will receive competitive pay.  Customers because if the owners are not building the right thing, then they can go elsewhere. As someone who has helped to build about 10 startup companies now, I have seen the power in making these three stakeholders equal partners.
Read more

Marrakech

Image
I just returned from a great trip to see Allison since she is doing a semester in Toulouse, France her Junior year. It is really cool to see your daughter grow up so well. We did a long weekend adventure to Marrakech. Allison has done a lot of studies about the French colonization of Northern Africa and some of the modern implications of that with immigrants to France. She was also supposed to be taking a course in Arabic, but alas the French are on strike so that class has met rarely. We stayed in a Marrakech Riad - Riad Dar Najat. This is a picture of Allison relaxing on their open lounge area on the top floor. Getting a good Riad is pretty important. Riad's are the equivalent of American Bed & Breakfasts. The streets in Marrakech are lined with walls typically without many windows. It is kind of hot and dirty. You open the door to the Riad and it is like an oasis! Open courtyard to the sky and typically three floors with a couple of bedrooms on each floor and an
Read more